By Maureen Storey  

In this journal we welcome new member Tony Jackson. Tony is researching the family of his grandmother Minnie Emma Soall (b 1906) whose line we can trace back to William Soall and Clementina Benson who married at St Leonard’s, Shoreditch, in 1775. Tony and other Soall researchers have been stuck at this point for some time: with no clues as to where he was born, William’s parentage remains unknown.

Sue Western came across the Society’s website when looking for information about her great grandparents John Lyons and Winifred Sole. John was a horse dealer from Kanturk, Co Cork who regularly travelled to Banbury to sell horses and it was on one of these visits that he met Winifred Sole – according to family legend they met at the White Horse Hotel. After their marriage John took his young bride back to live in Kanturk. We were able to help Sue extend her family tree back to Samuel Sole, who according to the 1851 census was born in Aston le Walls, Northamptonshire, in about 1777. The family seems to have been Roman Catholic – two of Samuel’s sons were baptized in Warkworth Castle Roman Catholic church and Samuel Heydon Sole (Winifred’s half-brother) became the Roman Catholic priest in Chipping Norton.

An enquiry about the Kelshall family came from Jan Warren, whose grandparents William Sole and Kate Berry married in Marylebone in 1922. William was born in Therfield in 1883, the son of another Sole/Berry marriage, that of Edward Sole and Mary Ann Berry (there are two more Sole/Berry marriages in the Kelshall family: Richard Sole and Sarah Berry in 1796 and Richard Sole and Theresa Berry in 1940). We’ve been able to help Jan with her Sole ancestors but what she’d like now is similar assistance with the Berrys of the Kelshall area, so if anyone can help please let me know.

Heidi Bridges asked if we had any information on her Sole family. She had traced them back to James Sole and Elizabeth Kidd who married in Islington in 1850. Our database showed that James was the grandson of William Sole and Dinah Woodland whose children were baptized in Hackney between 1790 and 1815. The information given to us by Heidi has enabled us to fill in some of the gaps in James and Elizabeth’s family – previously we hadn’t been able to find them in the 1861 and 1871 censuses and by the time we picked them up in 1881 the older children had already left home.

I’ve now finished updating the database with the new entries from the second edition of the LDS British Vital Records Index. The most intriguing of these new entries was the baptism at Redmarley d’Abitot (then Worcestershire, now Gloucestershire) in 1593 of George Sowle, son of Roger Sowle and Helene Angeworth (or Angell). This appears to be another candidate to be the George Soule who sailed on the Mayflower – the next step to see if this is a possibility is to check the parish register to see if this George survived childhood n

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